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GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE: STUDENTS TURNED TO LAZY RESEARCHERS

Nigeria is the Africa’s most populous country and most populous black nation on earth. Kwara State is one of the 36 states that make up the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Nigeria shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger Republic in the north. For any state to be competitive in industry it needs good educational research infrastructure institutions and in that sense, Kwara State is well served. Youths are the bedrock of a nation and Education is the key to empowerment.

A call has been made by a lecturer at the Kwara State University over the laziness of students in answering simple questions put to them that they solely relied on the power of Google search engine, phones to answer simple questions. The use of Google search has turned students to lazy researchers. He said students now relied mainly on their phone and computer set to solve simple questions as they did not want to stress their brain thinking.

A lecturer at the department of Mechanical Engineering Department, Kwara State University, Nigeria made this known in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Kwara State, Nigeria.

“It is becoming a worrisome issue as students now run to their computer sets before they can answer simple arithmetic. Even assignments are being uploaded from goggle search just to earn marks.

“Students become lazy everyday as they don’t want to go to the library and get books that will improve them; instead they stick to their phone to get every information needed.

“They are not ready to try things on their own as they believe there is short cut somewhere on the internet. They don’t disturb their brain anymore to do anything,’’

He said that over reliance on Google was a common thing at all levels of education in the country, adding “at primary, secondary and higher institutions, students believed in short cut to their assignments’’.

He called on lecturers, teachers and student trainers at all levels to ensure proper check on their students and also discourage them from downloading Google results to submit for class assignment. Students have become lazy due to their over-reliance on Google search for their academic works.

Students were advised to read books and use their brain in attempting questions as Google search alone would not aid their academic development.

Some students also share their opinion, that the world has gone beyond manual, paper work but the 21st century is an era of electronic learning. That Google search engine only frees the time spent on searching for academic materials. That student can even go to libraries and also read books on online through Google Search engine. That more advance books are online, academic resource materials are online than you can find in school libraries.

The revolution of accessing information from the comfort of one’s room cannot be reversed.

There’s an opportunity for everyone to access accurate, reliable resources from the library without being there physically by leveraging the power of technology.

Some universities are poorly connected to the internet and their lecturers lack the knowledge to us it effectively. Government should fund academic libraries to digitize all their academic material resources.

The conclusion of the discussion from majority of the students states that the lecturer is right to some extent that many students in Africa use the Google search engine in a lazy and wrong way.

We need to move along with the innovative trend and students should be taught from primary school level up how to use the Google search engine correctly.